Share This Story!

Zuckerberg: No plans to get into news business

Amazon,com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is buying The Washington Post, but fellow digital icon Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to get into the news business. "I can't see us getting into producing our own content,"

While Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is buying The Washington Post, fellow digital icon Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to get into the news business.

"I can't see us getting into producing our own content," the Facebook CEO says, particularly since there's already so much "awesome" material out there.

Zuckerberg made the comment today at the Newseum, a museum of news in Washington, D.C., at an event sponsored by The Atlantic magazine. Zuckerberg disclosed during the session that he was "like the least cool person there is" and is neither Republican nor Democrat, but rather "pro-knowledge economy."

Zuckerberg was asked by former journalist Terence Smith whether he was interested in getting into journalism as a producer of original content, as an aggregator of news stories or as a forum for debate.

While demurring on the prospect of ginning up a news creation operation, Zuckerberg pointed out that Facebook, which has 1.5 billion users around the globe, already aggregates an awful lot of material through its huge collection of posts, and even tries to rank them by the anticipated interest of the user. And each post, he added, offers the opportunity to serve as a forum.

Zuckerberg is making his first visit to the nation's capital in three years to lobby for immigration reform, a subject close to his heart. While immigration legislation has stalled, Zuckerberg said he remains optimistic, pointing out that he's an entrepreneur, "and you "don't go off and build something crazy if you're not optimistic about the world."

Asked about the National Security Agency's PRISM program, under which Facebook and other web mainstays have shared information with the federal government, Zuckerberg said he'd like to see more transparency from the feds

"We look at every request, and we push back if the request is overly broad," he said.